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Troy Garity, right, and Lee Pace star in "Soldier's Girl." Photo by KEN WORONER, SHOWTIME

The news media reported the Fort Campbell, Ky., killing as a brutal, drunken, hate-driven homicide, but when two producers decided to tell the story in a Showtime movie they saw it as a tender, but tragic, love story.

"Soldier's Girl," at 9 p.m. tomorrow on Showtime, is based on the true story of a young man who was beaten to death with a baseball bat by another soldier in 1999 while he was sleeping. The shocking killing touched off a controversy in Congress and elsewhere about the Pentagon's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy about homosexuals serving in the military.

The movie's producers, Doro Bachrach and Linda Gottlieb, chose to focus on the relationship between Barry Winchell and Calpernia Addams, a transgendered nightclub performer.

"We saw it as a love story and thought we could tell a very compelling story of two people who belonged together," Bachrach said in a phone conversation from New York. The film plays down the hatred and the homicide and focuses on the couple's relationship. The military's policy and the open gay-bashing practiced by some soldiers are only a subplot.

"We wanted the audience to root for Barry and Calpernia to be together so that the audience's expectations would be enlarged without having to make a heavy-handed political statement," Bachrach said.

Whether Bachrach and Gottlieb achieved that goal is in the eye of the beholder, but anyone not wearing blinders should find that the honest script, sensitively performed by a fine cast, helps make their point. You come away seeing the couple not as the freaks they're called, but as caring human beings who had a right to be left alone.

Much of the credit goes to Troy Garity as the soldier-victim, but even more stunning is the performance by Lee Pace as his transgender lover who was a nightclub performer.

The makeup team, which transformed the tall actor into a very believable woman, deserves an Emmy. The real Calpernia Addams is actually shorter and even more feminine now that she has completed her surgical transformation, according to Bachrach.

It was her seductive impersonation, which was both physical and psychological, that attracted Winchell when his Fort Campbell roommate Justin Fisher took him to a gay bar in Nashville. Winchell couldn't take his eyes off Addams.

The film makes it clear that the roommate had gender-identity confusion, bragging about his heterosexuality and bashing gays while trying to pick up club performers himself. There's more than a hint in the movie's script that Fisher was strongly attracted to Winchell but couldn't admit it, even to himself. "He was very possessive; he almost wanted to own Barry," Bachrach said.

"We also saw the story as a love triangle," said the producer, "but the amazing thing is that we don't believe Barry Winchell was gay."

That may be hard for viewers to accept, especially in some bedroom scenes. The picture is R-rated for sex and violence, but it isn't nearly as explicit as many heterosexual love stories these days.

Sex is only a small part of the plot, which successfully attempts to show how all of the characters in this real-life drama felt — the good guys and the bad. We learn that Addams was raised in Appalachia, was a missionary in Europe and served in the Navy in a field hospital during the first war in Iraq.

"She is a very bright, capable woman with such a positive attitude who sees the good in people," Bachrach said.

Bachrach thinks it was those qualities that Winchell also fell for. "People are complex. He saw her as a woman, loved her as a person and accepted her the way she was."

Fisher couldn't accept any part of it and was jealous. When a new, not very bright, recruit shows up, Fisher (Shawn Hatosy) gets him to plant rumors about Winchell's sexual preference, which feeds the bias of a drill instructor and further fuels the recruit's hatred of gays. During a drunken Fourth-of-July binge Fisher taunts the newcomer into taking a baseball bat and "messing up" Winchell, which results in the violent murder.

But "we never tried to make total villains out of them," Bachrach said. "We tried to show the rough times they had as kids too, and learn about their earlier life."

That also is the way the Army is treated in the film. Although a drill instructor is pictured as an instigator, Andre Braugher has a small part as a top sergeant who tries to steer a neutral and fair course.

"This is a story about four guys in the middle of America's heartland, driving down separate highways, who all collide at a junction," Bachrach said. "Now one is dead and two are in prison."

"Soldier's Girl" stays away from blame and incrimination for the most part. It really never puts the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy under the microscope.

"The upshot of the murder was a Pentagon review of its guidelines, but not much changed," Bachrach said. She acknowledged that the military requires sexual-harassment classes, but said she isn't sure "how seriously they take the training."

That's not, however, why she and Gottlieb made the movie.

"We aren't crusaders," Bachrach said. "We saw this as a love story and hoped we might change some hearts and minds."

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